# removing "bad" characters from title and other tags?
**URL:** https://community.mp3tag.de/t/removing-bad-characters-from-title-and-other-tags/5491
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [September 25, 2007, 10:52pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/removing-bad-characters-from-title-and-other-tags/5491 "2007-09-25T22:52:24Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@markeh](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/markeh)
#### Post date: [September 25, 2007, 10:52pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/removing-bad-characters-from-title-and-other-tags/5491/1 "2007-09-25T22:52:24Z")
Using vrsn 2.38..
I have some downloads that apparently have tag characters that either my iPod doesn't like, or my Alpine car radio can't display.
I have used the $validate function, but this doesn't seem to clear them out. In at least one case, a copy of the string to MSWord shows them as paragraph marks. (no, I don't know why they are there...)
These show up as squares in mp3tag. But the simple way - copying the bad character into a replace doesn't work because nothing is copied. In any case, I don't want to have to do this with each bad tag - there are too many.
I set Options\>tags\>mpeg\>write\>IDv2.3 ISO-8859-1, based on another post, and just re-saved the tags, but this also didn't seem to make any difference.
thanks for any help,
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### Author:  [@Sebastian\_Mares](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Sebastian_Mares)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2007, 6:14am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/removing-bad-characters-from-title-and-other-tags/5491/2 "2007-10-02T06:14:48Z")
$validate() only removes characters that Windows does not allow in filenames, such as colon, backslash, slash, pipe, etc. All other characters have to be removed manually with $replace() or maybe with a regular expression that replaces everything other than a-z, A-Z and 0-9 with an underscore.
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### Author:  [@system](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/system)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2026, 12:20pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/removing-bad-characters-from-title-and-other-tags/5491/3 "2026-02-09T12:20:31Z")